his -- my great grandfather was a german immigrant, and they just -- and there's an interesting speech that my grandfather gave at ohio state in 1926 where he said even back hen in 1926 he said -- then in 1926 we're being overwhelmed by uniformity. you know, the corporations and the banks and everything like that, they're trying to squeeze the heart out of you. and this was -- and also my -- i was going to say one more thing and that's my father's theory of the cycles of of american history, that you have liberal periods followed by conservative periods roughly every 30 years, that was my grandfather's theory. and so he picked up a lot of his, even his historical academic structures from my grandfather. >> stephen? >> both our relatives on my mother's side and my father's side were all from the midwest, so there was a kind of prairie populism that they brought to the east when we were growing up. and it was genetic. it was almost, you know -- >> part of the thing, jon, that's important especially given the current political climate in which we're so sliced and diced in so many ways tha